16 Responses to “Military death penalty paper”

Ignore Gene’s nitpicking, Eric’s paper is worth reading. We used the CJP materials throughout our motion practice (we plagerized shamelessly from motions Eric had filed in Kruetzer) and when we successfully argued to the MJ to give certain instructions when we defended Walker earlier this year. We also utilized the Colorado method when picking our panel – if only we could convince the MJ’s to let us use it in non-capital cases.

If the correct title is “Judge,” it’s important to get it right. To gain credibility, you have to get the small things right. Details matter. Shame on you apologists of sloppy work. Bravo, Gene, but don’t back down so easy next time.

Who says its important???? The self-indulgent academics? What about those who will actually put these concepts into practice does it matter to them? Pretty sure the cite clears up any confusion about where Judge Wiss practiced.

Good paper and the defect I picked up was something much different than Mr. Fidell . . . the lack of statistical data on the voting patterns of military panels. I’d love to see some formal study of the psychology of panel members based upon rank, age, gender, combat arms vs. noncombat arms, etc . . . As a former JAG I always felt like I was reliant too much on uniformed biases (combat arms hates barracks thiefs but gives awards for hitting another soldier with a table in a bar fight).

Agree. Such studies are long overdue. The first step might be replicating the work done with civilian juries, to see whether the findings transfer to military members. Seems like it would be a good project for the JAG schools or an LL.M. student.

Apart from psychology/dynamics, I’ve always wondered as a simple procedural matter how real life court-martial members actually conduct deliberations and voting on sentences (I suspect most of the times they actually deliberate and vote on the separate elements of the sentence, and not on the sentence as a whole).

by that standard, you shouldn’t miss a comma or it’s “sloppy work,” because after all, details matter.

At some point, it becomes a lazy way to excuse examining the substantive merits of the writing and instead focusing on minutiae and the fact that almost any long, detailed writing is going to have at least one flaw no matter how many times it is reviewed.

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